BERLIN — With as many as one million refugees having arrived in Germany this year, Chancellor Angela Merkel has found herself increasingly isolated in Europe and markedly less popular at home than she was during the crisis over the euro this spring.

So far, she has rejected all requests — the loudest from her own conservative bloc — to limit the influx of newcomers. Even as Germany runs short of physical shelter, she argues that it is both uncharitable and physically unworkable to halt the human flow into a country with thousands of miles of land borders and a post-Nazi obligation to liberally offer asylum.​Yet what she and other European leaders have quietly done over recent weeks is tighten asylum policy, restrict family reunions for refugees and mount campaigns to keep people from setting out for Europe. Balkan nations on the migrant trail that leads north from Turkey and Greece to Germany and Sweden have been encouraged to bar all but Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees.

BRUSSELS — Under heavy pressure from Germany to get a grip on the migrant crisis in the Continent after months of dithering, the European Union agreed to a deal on Sunday with Turkey that aims to slow the chaotic flood of asylum seekers into the 28-nation bloc.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, speaking to reporters late Sunday, acknowledged that the agreement, under which Europe will provide 3 billion euros, about $3.2 billion, and other inducements in return for Turkish help on migrants, would not immediately halt the flow of asylum seekers from the Middle East and elsewhere. But Ms. Merkel said it would help “keep people in the region” and out of Europe.

The meeting, the seventh gathering of European leaders since the spring regarding the divisive question of migration, came days after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane and added a new element of uncertainty to a crisis that has overwhelmed Europe.

Another cloud hanging over the Brussels gathering was the arrest last week of two prominent Turkish journalists, a move that deepened concerns among human rights activists and some European politicians that Turkeyhad taken an authoritarian turn under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"I have heard and read different opinions about the wave of Syrian refugees who try to make their way in to EU. Then I went to Lesvos. 7 Days on the Greek Island gave me a healthier human perspective on the situation. Seeing in my own eyes the people behind the headlines and feeling their deep struggle, broke my heart. Is this the “threat” people talk about? All I could see was courages people in a crisis. I also got to meet brave volunteers from all over the world who reach out to help all people regardless of their religion, race or background. That inspired me.

My hope is that this video will shake some of the bad ideas we sometimes feed ourselves with."

MYTILENE, Greece — On a recent day here on the Greek island of Lesbos, hundreds of asylum seekers squatted on ragged hillsides or rested in a warren of tentlike structures, clothes drying on leafless trees, as they waited to be registered and sent by ferry to the European mainland.

Just a few yards away, a reception center, long promised by European Union authorities to help Greece manage the number of migrants overwhelming these islands, remained under construction.

“We will be finished, I believe, by mid-December,” Stratis Manolakellis, a 37-year-old engineer overseeing the work, said as a Greek soldier in a bulldozer systematically battered an old military mess at the site. “And then, it will be very different here.”

In the wake of the Paris attacks, just how different — and how soon — has become an urgent matter not only for Greece but for all of Europe.

The unsettling knowledge that at least some of the Paris attackers whose Nov. 13 assaults killed 130 people entered Europe by infiltrating the throngs of migrants who have inundated Greek islands has now made security as much of a priority as humanitarian relief.

MISSION, Tex. — The numbers of migrants crossing the Rio Grande illegally have risen sharply in recent weeks, replaying scenes from the influx of Central American children and families in South Texas last year.

Once again, smugglers are bringing hundreds of women and children each day to the Mexican banks of the river and sending them across in rafts. In a season when illegal crossings normally go down, “The numbers have started going the other way,” said Raul L. Ortiz, acting chief of the Border Patrol for the Rio Grande Valley. Since Oct. 1, official figures show, Border Patrol apprehensions of migrant families in this region have increased 150 percent over the same period last year, while the number of unaccompanied children caught by agents has more than doubled.

The new flows here are smaller than the surge in the summer of 2014, but come after a year of declines in illegal crossings across the southwest border. The increases come as Americans’ concerns about border security are heightened after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris raised fears that terrorists would try to sneak into the United States. And they are complicating the Obama administration’s efforts to reassure the country that the border is under control.

The award-winning author of After Tomorrow on how stories invite us to explore what people who happen to be refugees are going through, leaving the places they know and becoming strangers in a strange land

Every night, at the moment, we see pictures of people who have risked their lives escaping terrible dangers. Day after day, reporters interview refugees marching through Hungary or arriving in Germany with nothing except what they can carry.

It might seem frivolous to be talking about stories at a time like this. Shouldn’t we be concentrating on the real world? Isn’t fiction soft and sentimental compared with the terrible news we keep hearing about drowning and suffocation?

No, it’s not. Only bad fiction is soft and sentimental. Good stories help us make sense of the world. They invite us to discover what it’s like being someone completely different. They are explorations - for the writer as well as the reader.

Five or six years ago – before the current crisis began – I spent a lot of time reading about Sudanese refugees in Chad. I had no intention of writing a book about them. I just kept thinking, “Suppose it was me? Would I cope as well as they do?” But I couldn’t really imagine their lives in Chad.

​Then one day, instead of thinking, “Suppose it was me?” I thought, “Suppose it was a boy called Matt? An English boy. How would hecope?” And that was the beginning of After Tomorrow, a novel about two English brothers who become refugees in France.

To be a refugee these days means to wake up almost each morning and witness anti-refugee sentiment plastered on the news, social media, and politicians. On November 18, 2015 after seeing the increased Islamophobia and xenophobia from American politicians, I decided to take to Twitter to explain the lengthy process of obtaining refugee status in the United States.

I am a refugee. In fact, I am a Bosnian Muslim refugee that obtained clearance to settle in the US after an almost four-year process. My journey started in 1998, four years after the Bosnian war and genocide which left my family and me displaced survivors. The first step was a visit to a UN Refugee Agency to apply for refugee status. What followed were months of providing documentation and proof that we were, in fact, a family of sound minds and able bodies, displaced by war and affected by the trauma of it.

We started with our identification: proof of where we used to live, proof we owned the homes that were now destroyed and under Serb occupation, proof my father was in a concentration camp, proof that I went to the school I did. After providing this information, we were required to provide references from friends, family, and former neighbors. We even had to provide the certification that members of our families were murdered during the war and genocide, and that some of them were considered missing.